Spawn 2, Behind the Scenes Part 1

Spawn 2 Edited by Deborah Sheldon, Behind the Scenes Part 1

SPAWN 2: MORE WEIRD HORROR TALES ABOUT PREGNANCY, BIRTH AND BABIES, conceived and edited by award-winning author and anthology editor Deborah Sheldon, will be released worldwide by IFWG Publishing on 25 November 2024. This second volume follows the multi-award-winning and multi-award-nominated anthology of Australian dread, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies.

Penned by established Australasian authors and fresh new voices, these stories range from the folkloric and phantasmagorical, through sci-fi and cybernetics, to historical and the occult. Spawn 2 interprets and reinterprets pregnancy, birth and babies in a myriad of unexpected ways that will frighten, shock, disgust, horrify, surprise, and move you.

In this four-part series exclusive to Ginger Nuts of Horror, the contributors have agreed to pull aside the curtain and reveal the inspiration behind their nightmarish tales.

PART ONE includes insights from editor Deborah Sheldon, and writers Lily Mulholland, Deryn Pittar, Emma Rose Darcy, Samuel. M. Johnston, and Em Starr.

EDITOR Deborah Sheldon on Spawn 2 and “The Tea and Sugar Train”

Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies is the second volume in my intended trilogy. While the first Spawn featured work by Australian writers, Spawn 2 accepted stories from writers across Australasia. And what a deliciously dark cornucopia of stories it turned out to be!

I got the idea for the Spawn trilogy from my story “Hair and Teeth”, first published in Aurealis in 2018, reprinted in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and mentioned in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year 2019. The images and themes of my story wouldn’t leave me alone. I decided that I wanted to curate a series of three anthologies in a similar vein; books that would resonate with readers by tapping into the terrors we all share from the shadowy depths of our reptilian brains. In 2019, I pitched Spawn to Gerry Huntman, managing director of IFWG Publishing, and he offered me an editorial contract.

Published in 2021, Spawn was critically acclaimed and shortlisted for six awards.

It won two of them: the Australian Shadows “Best Edited Work” Award for myself; and the Australian Shadows “Best Short Story” Award going to Matt Tighe for his contribution, “A Good Big Brother”. Matt’s work also appears in this second volume.

For Spawn 2, I requested “body horror” stories but left the subgenre open-ended. The selected stories range from space opera and cybernetics, through historical and phantasmagorical, to folk-horror, the occult, and more. Spawn 2 interprets and reinterprets pregnancy, birth and babies in a myriad of unexpected ways that will frighten, shock, disgust, surprise, and move you.

As editor, I’ve included my grisly body-horror tale “The Tea and Sugar Train”, first published in Dimension6 in 2019, and reprinted in both Year’s Best Hardcore Horror #5 and my award-nominated collection Liminal Spaces: Horror Stories. The inspiration for this story came from my mother-in-law.

My retired in-laws used to take frequent trips around Australia with their caravan.

One day when they were visiting us for afternoon tea, they spoke of their intention to drive from Melbourne to Perth; a journey of about 3,400 kilometres (2,110 miles) across some of the harshest, most unforgiving terrain that our desert continent has to offer. Alarmed, I expressed concern. “Oh, no worries!” my mother-in-law said. “The route is popular now. Funny to think we’ll be following the tracks that used to carry the tea and sugar train.” Carry the what? I’d never heard of this particular train before. As soon as I looked it up online and saw its jumble of mismatched carriages, I started plotting a story.

Another significant inspiration was the heavy clumsiness of my own pregnancy from some 23 years ago. Gestation, with all its various weird and wonderful accoutrements, is remembered deeply by her body for the rest of a woman’s life.

I hope you enjoy reading Spawn 2 as much as I enjoyed putting it together for you.

Deborah Sheldon

Lily Mulholland on “Body of Work”

Body horror has always been my favourite sub-genre of the broader horror oeuvre. David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Ridley Scott’s Alien exploited our deep fears of evisceration and losing ourselves to dark forces. These films, along with novels like Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, showed us that sometimes death is kinder than (un)reality.

There was a moment when I was giving birth to my first child that I felt death may have been preferable, as my innards stretched and twisted over eighteen agonising hours to expel the creature within. Who needs fiction when childbirth brings its own horror? Fortunately, that feeling was fleeting, replaced by the deep love and wonder that comes with the arrival of a new being who you created with your own body.

These were the thoughts swirling in my brain when I saw the call out for Spawn 2, with its focus on pregnancy, birth and babies.

Women and their place in society are always at the centre of my stories, so this was the perfect opportunity for a new short piece.

I wondered how I could tap my own experience, which led me to think about the ‘influencer mummies’ whose perfect pregnancies and birth plans made the rest of us feel like ‘bad mummies’ before we even had a babe in arms. These influencers are posited within the wider toxic-wellness culture that fed the breakdown of trust in science and government during the COVID pandemic. Like a virus, their insidious peddling of capitalist FOMO has contributed to undermining the ideals and desires of successive generations. Just look at the state of social media if you want to see how we are travelling as a species.

Of course, influencers are not the only societal group that operates in ethically dubious ways. Medical research, especially that into reproductive cloning, has developed technology that could benefit the public good as easily as it could be co-opted by big business and used to nefarious ends. In our transactional world, which experimental pathway is more likely, where corporations fund research and the concept of altruism seems increasingly fantastical?

In response to these ideas, “Body of Work” interrogates the question: what price are we as a species prepared to pay for the commercialisation of women’s bodies?

If you enjoy my story, please visit my website https://lilymulholland.com.au/ or connect with me at @LM_Mulholland on Instagram.

Deryn Pittar on “Too Full”

I love a challenge and I’m newly arrived at the horror genre. I saw the call for entries to Spawn 2 and wondered if I could create something good enough to be included in the anthology. After all, I thought, “Horror is just the same as any other genre. All that is different is the choice of words you use.” (This may not be true.)

I wondered how far a mother’s love would stretch to protect her child, and how many of society’s rules the child would have to break or bend before the mother had to take action, to either punish or defend.

This needed to be the mother’s decision alone, therefore the mother had to be single.

This is a common and frequent situation in today’s world. The modern dating apps, and the tendency to ‘hook up’ meant this was easily solved. The beginning line slid effortlessly onto the page: “It began the night I swiped right one time too many.”

The story flowed, with pauses as I added words to create an atmosphere and infer, rather than actually state, what was happening. I’m not into writing graphic gore and violent action so I needed to be subtle. I was pleased with the result and the title just popped out, once it hit the page.

I’ve since had some success in other short horror pieces.  I’m not ready yet to write a longer scary piece. I’m not sure I could sustain the tension, but I love the challenge of short fiction. My usual fictional world involves sci-fi, fantasy or contemporary fiction. I’ve also written a cosy mystery, an award-winning dragon story, and dabbled in a bit of poetry. I have a newsletter I post once a month with a piece of short fiction to entertain. You can sign up here: https://iwriteuread.substack.com

I have a dystopian novel with IFWG Publishing called The Carbonite’s Daughter. This novel was a finalist in the 2023 Sir Julius Vogel Best Youth Novel Award: https://www.amazon.com/Carbonites-Daughter-Deryn-Pittar/dp/1922556467/r The sequel Quake City will be released August 2024.

You can find all my novels on my Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/author/derynpittar

Emma Rose Darcy on “Mother of Horrors” 

“Mother of Horrors” was originally going to be a story about a young woman camping alone in a forest while she worked on a field assignment for her biology course. The gist of it was that she would slip and fall into a stink pit – a hole that people dig to trap animals – and the more carrion is in the pit, the more animals, like foxes, it attracts. After she is rescued from the pit, she finds out she is in the early stages of pregnancy but is convinced that it’s actually pieces of fox carcasses inside her. She gets more and more delirious and ill, and the story was meant to be ambiguous as to what she was ever pregnant with: baby or fox.

Some stories just do not want to be written, however, and all that remains of that draft is the section where Tom follows the sound of music through the forest that at once tantalises and maddens him.

I stopped trying to write a specific story and literally started with my character waking up, and blundered along with him as he tried to understand how he came to be where he was and how he came to meet the fate he did.

The stink pit concept went into my notebook of story ideas that failed to launch.

The “Mother of Horrors” as it stands now began with, as it does in the story, Tom waking up in the attic, and I followed him down the stairs. I had no idea where I was going with it, except that he would be following the music through the forest to witness the meeting of nightmares. The character of the Mother created herself, as antagonists often do. She knew exactly who she was the moment I thought of her. Nell, however, beguiled me as much as she did Tom, as I didn’t realise who she was until she slipped through my grasp, as she did his.

I write everything longhand, which I find allows for a dreamy stream-of-consciousness freedom that I can’t access when I’m typing. I end up staring at the screen and progress grinds to a halt as I become fixated on checking my word count. Writing by hand flows and is exhausting, for it is by turns the lazy river and the rapids.

https://www.instagram.com/ofcoursethehorrors/?igsh=aXJ3NWk3dmw3cDMw

https://www.threads.net/@ofcoursethehorrors

Samuel. M. Johnston on “Chop_Shop”

The idea for “Chop_Shop” came from my love of cybernetics and all the interesting prosthetics work we’ve been developing as well as my love for the cyberpunk genre, especially the video game series Deus Ex. I would sit on YouTube just watching breakdowns of these technological developments and what it could mean for us in the future.

With those inspirations floating around in my head, I wanted to create a world where augmentation dictates a tiered system of life and how those issues ripple across a society. While “Chop_Shop” doesn’t cover all the ideas I have in my head for this world, I wrote this story as an insight into the darkness of giving up your life for progress and survival. It was difficult to find the balance between the horror the protagonist is trying to escape while maintaining the motivations for the ‘villain’ characters, without making the situation black or white.

Identity plays a big role as the story’s underlying theme, what giving up part of yourself can do to someone and the necessity of cruelty for survival.

I kept coming back to the story over the years, adding small details to the characters to flesh them out piece by piece as I always thought there was something missing. I’ve purposefully kept the protagonist ambiguous to express the loss of identity, how they try to cling onto the fragments of their memories while everyone else treats them like an emotionless machine. That choice also made the feedback I’ve received very interesting as everyone who’s read this piece has had different interpretations of the character’s identity and how they saw the events of the story affecting them. It led to a few debates in my university classes about the purpose of the horror and how it fit the themes, which really helped me figure out the true motivations of my antagonists.

One of my close friends recommended me to submit this story to Spawn 2 as they thought it fit the anthology’s theme quite well. That pressure to submit got me thinking on the core of my narrative and how I could expand on the themes more. The anthology’s theme of being pregnancy, birth and babies gave me new ideas to tie the whole story together, as before it was clearly divided into two halves: The Escape and The Aftermath.

This new perspective led to a snowball effect of little additions throughout and turned it into the story you see in the anthology.

I’ve always wanted to create my own science fiction worlds and just explore the ideas of going beyond what it means to be human. It’s awesome I get the opportunity to show people the ideas cooking in my head. “Chop_Shop” is one of the many projects I’ve been working on, and part of my goal to work in as many genres and as many mediums as I can. Those other projects can be found on my Instagram @creativeman_sam as well as the other adventures I get up to.

Em Starr on “Stale” 

I was super-excited when I heard about the open call for Spawn Vol 2, making the decision to submit for two main reasons. First, I was stoked at the opportunity to be part of an incredible award-winning franchise and to work with editor, Deborah Sheldon. Second, the idea of exploring pregnancy, birth and babies, in the context of body horror, felt oh-so-right, given my own experiences as a teenage mum, in the 90’s. Let’s just say there was no pregnancy glow, only exhaustion, nausea, and some physical changes I was not entirely impressed with! Don’t get me started on the 2am champignon and tuna sandwich cravings.

I’d been working on another story for the anthology when the concept for “Stale” came about, organically and accidentally. I was travelling home from my daughter’s wedding, road-tripping from Brisbane to Melbourne, and happened to stop in the rural town my children were conceived and born in—a place I made the decision to leave shortly after. Nothing had changed. It looked like the same place I left twenty-odd years ago, with the same landscape, the same schools, the same families. It was like a snapshot of a memory that had mouldered and I felt all the emotions of my seventeen-year-old self, when I was pregnant and desperate to get out.

I wrote “Stale” to help reconcile the residual feelings of hopelessness that I felt being back there, even for those short ten minutes. I really wanted to explore the power of generational ties in small towns, how they can keep people trapped in places they don’t want to be, and how attitudes to pregnancy and motherhood can be cyclically repeated—flaws and all.

www.emstarr.com.au

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SPAWN 2: MORE WEIRD HORROR TALES ABOUT PREGNANCY, BIRTH AND BABIES

A selection of the darkest Australasian fiction.

Curated by Deborah Sheldon, this second volume follows the multi-award-winning and multi-award-nominated anthology of Australian dread, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies.

Spawn 2 interprets and reinterprets pregnancy, birth and babies in a myriad of unexpected ways that will frighten, shock, disgust, horrify, surprise, and move you.

Penned by established authors and fresh new voices, these stories range from the folkloric and phantasmagorical, through sci-fi and cybernetics, to historical and the occult.

Prepare for an intimate, anxious, eviscerating read.

Featuring work by:

Dmitri Akers— Emma Rose Darcy—Matthew R. Davis—Rachel Denham-White—Jason Franks—Rowan Hill—Samuel M. Johnston—Carole Kelly—Ben Matthews—Lily Mulholland—Anthony O’Connor—Robyn O’Sullivan—Leanbh Pearson—Kat Pekin—Deryn Pittar—Dani Ringrose—Carol Ryles—Deborah Sheldon—Em Starr—H.K. Stubbs—Matt Tighe—Pauline Yates

DEBORAH SHELDON

DEBORAH SHELDON is an award-winning author and editor from Melbourne, Australia. She writes poems, short stories, novellas and novels across the darker spectrum of horror, crime and noir. Her award-nominated titles include the novels Cretaceous Canyon, Body Farm Z, Contrition and Devil Dragon; the novella Thylacines; and the collections Figments and Fragments: Dark Stories and Liminal Spaces: Horror Stories.

Deb’s collection Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories won the Australian Shadows ‘Best Collected Work’ Award, was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, and longlisted for a Bram Stoker. Her short fiction has been widely published, shortlisted for numerous Australian Shadows and Aurealis Awards, translated, and included in various ‘best of’ anthologies.

She has won the Australian Shadows ‘Best Edited Work’ Award three times: for Midnight Echo 14; and for the anthologies she conceived and edited, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies, and Killer Creatures Down Under: Horror Stories with Bite. As a senior editor at IFWG Publishing, Deb specialises in horror anthologies.

Deb’s other credits include TV scripts such as NEIGHBOURS, AUSTRALIA’S MOST WANTED and STATE CORONER; magazine feature articles; non-fiction books (Reed Books, Random House); stage plays; and award-winning medical writing. Visit Deb at http://deborahsheldon.wordpress.com

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IFWG PUBLISHING is owned by Australian company SQ Mag Pty Ltd (which also manages IPI Comics) and has been operating for nearly 15 years. It is a publishing house that is passionate about all dimensions of speculative fiction, but is partly keen on supporting underrepresented writers and themes/styles. The company is globally distributed by IPG Books, based in Chicago.

https://ifwgpublishing.com

Further Reading